Kindred tells the riveting story of Dana, a modern black woman who is mysteriously transported back to the antebellum South.
Dana must protect Rufus, a white slaveholder, and her ancestor.
With richly drawn characters and thought-provoking themes, Kindred poignantly examines power, collaboration, and family bonds against the dark backdrop of America’s history of slavery.
Kindred Quotes With Page Numbers
“I lost an arm on my last trip home.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Prologue, Page 9
“…I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought – and much less than I would know when he went away.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fall, section 1, Page 57
“Someday Rufus would own the plantation. Someday, he would be the slaveholder, responsible in his own right for what happened to the people who lived in those half-hidden cabins. The boy was literally growing up as I watched—growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children. I would have all I could do to look after myself. But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the narrator, The Fall, section 3, Page 68
“As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fall, section 5, Page 87
“Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the narrator, The Fall, section 7, Page 97
“Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana to Kevin, The Fall, section 7, Page 100
“I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. ‘The ease seemed so frightening.’ I said. ‘Now I see why.’
‘What?’
‘The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana and Kevin, The Fall, section 7, Page 101
“I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fall, section 7, Pages 101-02
“Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War II books – a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.
… Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture – quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fall, section 2, Pages 116-17
“There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the narrator, The Fight, section 4, Page 124
“He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the narrator, The Fight, section 6, Page 134
“She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You need to look at some of the niggers they catch and bring back,” she said. “You need to see them—starving, ’bout naked, whipped, dragged, bit by dogs … You need to see them.” “I’d rather see the others.” “What others?” “The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now.” “If any do.” “They do.” “Some say they do. It’s like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to tell you about it.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Sarah, The Fight, section 7, Page 145
“I’d rather see the others.”
“What others?”
“The ones who make it. The ones living in freedom now.”
“If any do.”
“They do.”
“Some say they do. It’s like dying, though, and going to heaven. Nobody ever comes back to
tell you about it.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana and Sarah, The Fight, section 7, Page 145
“Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.” I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fight, section 10, Page 157
“That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana, The Fight, section 6, Page 140
“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fight, section 6, Page 141
“Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fight, section 8, Page 149
“She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the narrator, The Fight, section 12, Page 168
“That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fight, section 13, Page 177
“Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Fight, section 16, Page 182
“She means it doesn’t come off, Dana… The black. She means the devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Nigel to Dana, The Storm, section 8, Page 224
“She means the devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Nigel, The Fight, section 8, Page 224
“Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Storm, section 11, Page 229
“Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bottled inside me.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Dana as the Narrator, The Rope, section 4, Page 252
“in an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”
~Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, Reader’s Guide, Page 267